Intention-oriented organizational modeling - a top-down approach

The involvement of human resources is a necessity in many organizations. In these organizations, there are processes that may require decisions taken by the human resources. The processes that are accomplished through human knowledge have irregular sequence of execution steps, i.e., the series of activities to be carried out are not structured. It is also important to guide such unstructured organizational processes and resources because they work towards the achievement of an organizational intention. Thus, designing models that serve as guide in order to achieve the organizational intentions are of prime importance. The intentions play a critical role in organizations because they motivate the organizational resources to work towards the overall development of an organization. Thus, supporting modeling of the intentions, strategies to achieve the intentions, capabilities required by the strategies, resources that provide the capabilities and processes that implement the strategies everything together in a holistic way is vitally important for any organizational modeling approach. The holistic way of modeling is required, because each modeling element requires modeling of its associated element. Traditional modeling approaches that are oriented to the sequence of activities, are not suitable when the sequence of activities cannot be determined in advance. Hence, there is a need for a modeling approach that enables creating models as guide in order to achieve an intention rather than providing sequence of steps required to achieve an intention. This master thesis work, proposes a modeling approach based on the derived requirements of the intention-oriented organizational modeling. The proposed approach allows creating organizational models that acts as a descriptive guide, e.g., providing information about the required strategies to achieve an intention. In the proposed modeling approach, the intentions are realized through the strategies which are associated with the capabilities that are satisfed by the resources. As a result, the unstructured organizational processes realizes the strategies that are associated with the capabilities, resources and intentions. A motivating scenario from an organization that belongs to the manufacturing sector is provided to help the reader in easily acquiring the concepts of the proposed approach. The approach is realized as a web-based modeling tool through which organizational models can be created. To assess, feasibility of the proposed approach and usability of the developed modeling tool, we also provide a case study centered around the motivating scenario

Supporting organizational goals with mobile apps

Informal Processes are human-centric business processes with unpredictable activities during modeling time. The Informal Process Essentials (IPE) approach aims for modeling informal processes in a resource-centric way so that the desired outcomes of informal process can be reproduced. Entities in IPE approach include organizational goals, capabilities, context, resources, and informal process. They are connected in organizations together. Mobile application is widely used in common business to enhance business process from different aspects like flexibility and efficiency. Whereas support for informal processes using evolving mobile devices has not been investigated yet. In this thesis, requirements for organizational modeling will be investigated and satisfying solution concepts will be presented. As mobile applications have different use case scenarios and criteria compared with desktop applications, we derive the requirements from these use case scenarios and criteria. Hereafter, we propose new concepts, such as notifications and interactions, note list, privilege management, interactive group and interactive participants. To validate our concepts, we provide a case study on a mobile modeling scenario supported by an Android application implementing. Our work introduces four added values compared current modeling approach for informal process, including time-involving definitions, location-independent modeling, interrelated participants and context aware definitions

Recognition of resource patterns in human-centric processes : a case study

Business experts need to improve business processes by increasing process efficiency and reducing process costs. To achieve this, a common method is to capture a series of repeatedly conducted process activities and their structure, i.e. the business logic of the process, and then enact process execution based on it. However, there exist informal processes, which are human-centric processes that are highly dynamic. Since this approach assumes the existence of predictable business logic of the process, it does not apply for management of informal processes. The Informal Process Essentials (IPE) model is a modeling approach for informal processes. This model depicts informal processes by documenting resources used in these process. Through this approach, we are able to retain best practice and knowledge accumulated in the processes. Based on this approach, there is also the InProXec method to enable the application of the IPE approach in organizations. In this thesis work, we want to validate the concepts introduced in the InProXec method using a case study on the jclouds project. To achieve this aim, we introduce the concept of a generic mapping mechanism and an evolving correlation coefficient function. Based on these concepts, we present the Informal Process Discoverer (IPD) service. The IPD service is an implementation of the discovery of IPE models. The test results of the IPD service have shown that the service is successful in discovering the IPE model and giving process recommendations. For example, using an informal process model with includes 7 human resources and 2 GitHub repositories as input, we are able to discover 74 other resources that participate in the process including 65 human resources and 9 Git repositories

Resource-driven processes : concept, use, and incorporation

Reaching organizational goals requires executing business processes. Modeling, using, and improving existing knowledge about business processes establishes organizational best practices. A common method for this is accomplished in an activity-oriented way by modeling, using, and improving business processes based on recurring activities and their order. Furthermore, modeled activities and their coordination can be automated with the help of IT infrastructures to increase automation and support for actors. Unfortunately, activities and their order in business processes are not always (i) foreseeable at modeling time or (ii) repeated in different executions. This variation of activities and their order among business processes decreases the usefulness of activity-oriented modeling approaches and raises the need for another approach to (i) support such business processes and (ii) reproduce desired outcomes. In addition, this need is intensified by increasing demands toward individualized products and solutions, as each product and solution can require custom-tailored activities in a different order. In this work, we introduce a resource-driven approach for modeling and executing business processes. Our approach relies on automatically allocated interrelated resources for supporting actors participating in business processes and reproducing their desired outcomes. To create definitions of business processes in a resource-driven way, we present a formal resource-driven process modeling language capable of specifying business processes in terms of their goals, capabilities, and interrelated resources. To evaluate and validate our approach, we conducted a survey with 416 participants. Results of the survey confirm our claims regarding (i) increased support for actors of business processes and (ii) the reproducibility of their desired outcomes using our resource-driven approach. For using resource-driven processes in organizations, we present a resource-driven process management life cycle involving four phases. The first phase of the life cycle describes steps needed for preparing an IT infrastructure enabling the steps conducted in other phases of the life cycle. In the second phase, business experts model resource-driven processes by starting with specifying goals and ending with selecting appropriate interrelated resources. The execution of resource-driven processes takes place in the third phase. Upon initializing modeled resource-driven processes, interrelated resources of resource-driven processes are automatically allocated, if applicable. The allocated resources collaboratively work toward the goals specified in definitions of resource-driven processes resulting in interactions between resources. In the fourth phase, these interactions are analyzed to generate resource-centric recommendations to guide business experts during modeling. We implemented a series of prototypes and conducted an expert survey to validate and evaluate the life cycle. Finally, we present the means of incorporating resource-driven processes into activity-oriented business process models. Therefore, we present a new type of activity construct called context-sensitive activity, adapting the execution based on the current situation. We validated the concept of context-sensitive activities by extending a tool for activity-oriented business processes to support context-sensitive activities

Gathering solutions and providing APIs for their orchestration to implement continuous software delivery

In traditional IT environments, it is common for software updates and new releases to take up to several weeks or even months to be eventually available to end users. Therefore, many IT vendors and providers of software products and services face the challenge of delivering updates considerably more frequently. This is because users, customers, and other stakeholders expect accelerated feedback loops and significantly faster responses to changing demands and issues that arise. Thus, taking this challenge seriously is of utmost economic importance for IT organizations if they wish to remain competitive. Continuous software delivery is an emerging paradigm adopted by an increasing number of organizations in order to address this challenge. It aims to drastically shorten release cycles while ensuring the delivery of high-quality software. Adopting continuous delivery essentially means to make it economical to constantly deliver changes in small batches. Infrequent high-risk releases with lots of accumulated changes are thereby replaced by a continuous stream of small and low-risk updates. To gain from the benefits of continuous delivery, a high degree of automation is required. This is technically achieved by implementing continuous delivery pipelines consisting of different application-specific stages (build, test, production, etc.) to automate most parts of the application delivery process. Each stage relies on a corresponding application environment such as a build environment or production environment. This work presents concepts and approaches to implement continuous delivery pipelines based on systematically gathered solutions to be used and orchestrated as building blocks of application environments. Initially, the presented Gather'n'Deliver method is centered around a shared knowledge base to provide the foundation for gathering, utilizing, and orchestrating diverse solutions such as deployment scripts, configuration definitions, and Cloud services. Several classification dimensions and taxonomies are discussed in order to facilitate a systematic categorization of solutions, in addition to expressing application environment requirements that are satisfied by those solutions. The presented GatherBase framework enables the collaborative and automated gathering of solutions through solution repositories. These repositories are the foundation for building diverse knowledge base variants that provide fine-grained query mechanisms to find and retrieve solutions, for example, to be used as building blocks of specific application environments. Combining and integrating diverse solutions at runtime is achieved by orchestrating their APIs. Since some solutions such as lower-level executable artifacts (deployment scripts, configuration definitions, etc.) do not immediately provide their functionality through APIs, additional APIs need to be supplied. This issue is addressed by different approaches, such as the presented Any2API framework that is intended to generate individual APIs for such artifacts. An integrated architecture in conjunction with corresponding prototype implementations aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the presented approaches. Finally, various validation scenarios evaluate the approaches within the scope of continuous delivery and application environments and even beyond